Christie Blatchford: Phoenix just one victim of intergenerational disfunction in Sinclair family

Christie Blatchford: Phoenix just one victim of intergenerational disfunction in Sinclair family

Just a year before Phoenix Sinclair disappeared from under the nose of Winnipeg’s Child and Family Services agency only to turn up dead in a northern reserve dump, a judge’s report on another aboriginal child-welfare tragedy was released.

Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Arnold Conner’s report under the Fatality Inquiries Act into the Jan. 26, 1996 death of baby Sophia Schmidt excoriated the work of several CFS workers and supervisors.

At one point, the judge remarked that while Manitoba may have a working child-welfare system, what it doesn’t have is “a child-welfare system that works.”

Stunningly, little Sophia’s death — she suffered fatal brain swelling after being shaken, but also a raft of other terrible injuries, including broken bones and bite marks — was caused by none other than Norma Jean Sinclair, sister of Phoenix Sinclair’s father, Steve.

Mr. Sinclair, now 32, testified this week at the provincial inquiry now underway here into Phoenix’s death.

The little girl died shortly after her fifth birthday in June of 2005, her remains discovered 10 months later at the Fisher Lake First Nation dump.

She was last seen safe and well in April of 2004, when Rohan Stephenson, her de facto foster father, reluctantly handed her over to Samantha Kematch, her biological mother.

Kematch and her then-lover Karl McKay were convicted of first-degree murder in the death of the child they had confined to a basement pen, beaten and forced to eat her own vomit.

While Mr. Sinclair had no role in his daughter’s slaying, his dysfunction as a parent contributed to the ease with which Kematch was able to retrieve the little girl from Mr. Stephenson’s care and disappear with her.

Norma Jean Sinclair pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Sophia’s death and received a five-year prison sentence.

Her boyfriend and the biological father of Sophia, Wade Tanner, was convicted of criminal negligence in the nine-month-old’s death and went to jail for four years.

But the question that most absorbed the judge was how on earth Sophia had come to be placed by CFS into the home of Sinclair and Tanner, given their respective backgrounds of alcoholism, violence and monstrous dysfunction, much of it well-established in the agency’s own files.

“It is incomprehensible to me how the child-welfare system would permit” a vulnerable infant to be in the care of the couple, Judge Conner wrote.

At the time Sophia died, Norma Jean was 23. All four of her own children had at one time or another been taken into care.

One, who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome — the silent villain in both these ghastly stories — was made a permanent ward.

Yet in the year before Sophia’s death, Norma Jean and Tanner somehow ended up caring for her two older boys and their own infant son with the blessing of the CFS.

And on top of that, into the couple’s home Sophia — a child of Tanner by another woman — Sophia was permitted to come.

The judge’s report also gives a searing glimpse into the profoundly troubled lives of the couple who are at the centre of the current inquiry, Kematch and Steve Sinclair.

CFS files now in evidence at the hearing show that Mr. Sinclair was removed from his mother’s clutches because of serious physical and sexual abuse, violence and her chronic alcoholism.

His sister Norma Jean was abandoned by that mother when she was six.

The mother left her in the care of an elderly couple who abused and starved her. When her father rescued her, it was to a home filled with abusive adults. Norma Jean was sexually and physically abused by her grandfather and cousins, and she and the other children routinely hid under their beds whenever their father arrived home, drunk and raging.

She had her first baby at 16.

Kematch was also born to a chronic alcoholic who physically and emotionally abused her. She was made a permanent ward of the Cree Nation Child and Family Caring Agency, and a lengthy report on file at the inquiry shows she was also a desperately unhappy young woman with a significant alcohol problem.

One of her brothers killed himself by jumping off an elevator.

Kematch had her first child at the age of 17.

Several CFS reports note Kematch was uninterested in her children — the third, a baby named Echo, died of pneumonia when Phoenix was about a year old.

The judge noted that the three young women in the tale he was examining — Norma Jean Sinclair, the friend who cared for her children and baby Sophia’s natural mother — had 17 children among them. Sixteen were apprehended.

In fact, the CFS files in the current case are replete with warnings about the young parents.

As early as 1998, a so-called “child in care form” described Mr. Sinclair as remaining “a highly disturbed individual who should not be in charge of dependent children,” while a lengthy report on Kematch from the Cree agency, sent to the CFS four days after Phoenix was born, describes her as “abnormally aggressive” young woman who poses “a threat to adults and other children” in her foster home.

As a cruel measure of the intergenerational nature of the crippling dysfunction in this story, Kematch for a time stayed in an emergency bed at the same hotel CFS used several years later to house Phoenix.